Can nanoparticles enhance delivery performances of hydrogels?

For the past four decades, both academia and industry have paid much attention to the promise of designing smart drug-delivery carriers [1]. The need to overcome the main issues of traditional routes such as oral and intravenous administration has caused advancements in the medical field. While pills and injections represented a substantial improvement in medicine, they cannot address the main medical challenges of today. These challenges include the need for controlled release kinetics and reductions in the number of doses required, drug drawbacks due to overdosing differing from drug-to-drug and the use of drugs that have short half-lives and show toxicity if administered without control [2]. These conditions caused the development of a discipline dedicated to the development of controlled drug-delivery systems. This field brings together historically multidisciplinary topics across engineering, biology, chemistry, pharmacology and medicine, facilitating the ability to guarantee an effective plasma drug level for a therapeutic time period, avoiding over- and underdosing.